Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 04.djvu/760

* CHINESE LANGUAGE. 663 CHINESE LANGUAGE. imitate the resuscitated ancients, whose pres- tige' in eastern Asia always far exceeds the most brilliant successes of authors among their own conleniporaries. Before touching upon this re- vival of learning in China, however, it is proper to refer nrieliy to the non-Confucian liter- ature of Taoism and the mystics. 'I'he philoso- pher Lao-tsz', an earlier contemporary of Confu- cius, g.ave birth to a philosophy of quietism, the esoteric meaning of which is hard to determine. The pursuit of ttio, as set forth in the Tnote cliiiig, a work ascribed (improperly) to the teaciier, suggests Hindu transcendentalism and may be derived from India. In its purity it never took much liold on the practical and world- ly-minded Chinese, but idealists exist even there. and to these such speculations have invariably appealed. In the Fourth Centurj' a.u. there arose an author (Cliwang Tsz') who illuminated for his followers the dark places of tno, and by the charm and eruditiim of his style elevated his exposition to a high place in the literature of a country where style atones for all heresy. The history of the sect of tao, which passed from pure mysticism to the utmost pretensions of alchemy and divination, does not belong here, nor is there nuich more than this to be said of the numerous writings of the Buddhists, which begin here in the Fir.st Century a.d., but which have never greatly afTected the literary life of educated China. While elucidations of the Confucian canon con- stitute an imjiortant part of the literary output of China during its mediicval period, the chief distinction of the Han era comes from the devel- opment of poetry and of historical writing. To ^iei Shiiig (Second Century a.d.) belongs the honor of first exhibiting the l)eauties of the five- word metre, in which form have been produced the finest specimens of the poetic art in the lan- guage. Rhymes are of course easily foimd in a monosyllabic language of few sounds, but Chinese verse calls for similar tones to perfect the rh^^ne and demands also the disposal of rising and fall- ing tones in the line in accordance with a scheme which recalls the niceties of metrical arrange- ment among the Greeks. The identification of the lunnan mood with nature, which w,a.s almost unknown in Eurdpe until modern times, appears strong and fresh as a poetic motif in China, as elsewhere in the East, from very early ages. In our comprehension of their art, however, the need of translation is a portentous obstacle; whatever the care of the translator, there must always remain differences in standpoint, in mode of life, and intellectual environment to thwart and prejudice the resulting cfTect upon readers in an alien land. Where every chance .allusion to history and familiar custom, where nature her- self, as exhibited in an exotic clime, require ex planation before the sense is secure, it is hard to keep the flowers of Chinese verse from withering when transferred to another speech. In history the language, of course, fares better, and scholars have reason to look for larger results from trans- lations of the standard Chinese historians than from those of any other Asiatic peoples. First of these authors in time and reputation — next to Confucius, who preached but could not write his- tory — is Sz'-ma Ch'icn (born B.C. 14.5), whose 'Historical Record' relates the history of China from the beginning dowTi to nearly his own period. Its 52fi,500 words, all originally scratched on bamboo tablets with a stylus, have been conned and counted with such all'ectionate care in sub- sequent ages as to have become the inivarying tyf)e of historical prcsentati<m in China ever since. Each dynasty has made it a serious busi- ness to compile the nation's annals during the preceding dynasty as well as to collect rec- ords for its own reigns, and tile twenty-four djTiastic histories produced in a uniform set of 21!) volumes in 1747 are an exhibit of intellec- tual activity creditable in the extreme to the Chinese mind, even if their pages do not glow with marks of genius or lofty imagination. These official histories are supplemented by pri- vate memoirs, local annals, travels, and topog- rai)hies, and at long intervals authors l)ave ap- peared to contintie the work of Confucius and Sz'-ma Ch'ien by revising and condensing the national history into aeceptjible literary form. Such have been Sz'-ma Kwang, whose history in 3fiO books appeared in the Eleventh Century, and Cl;u Fu-tsz', who issued an 'abridgment' in .55 books in the Twelfth Century. On the whole, the mass of historical literature of all kinds in China may be called enormous, a mine as yet almost imworked by European students. In the rather scant literature of foreign travel should he mentioned the accounts of the journeys of the Buddhist pilgrims Fa Hsien in the Fourth Cen- ttiry and of Ilsiian Tsang in the Sex'enth Century to India in search of holy books and images. They seem to have inspired in China no lasting interest in foreign lands or desire to travel abroad, but by the efforts of these and other priests in translating Buddhist books much of the literature of lluit creed which would other- wise have perished in its extinctidu in India has been preserved for the researches of modern scholars. After a long period of political disturbance and comparative intellectual sterility following the fall of the House of Han, there arose the T'ang Dynasty (a.d. U00-!)0(»), during which China may be said to have reached the zenith of its intellectual life. "Poetry." declares a Chi- nese critic, "began with the .S7(i7i, developed with the Li Sao, burst forth and became perfect under the T'angs. Much excellent work was achieved under the Ilan and Wei dynasties: their writers appear to have selected good subjects, but their language was unequal to its expression." It was notably the age of lyric verse, e.xiiressed in a lan- guage which had by this time become refined and adajjted to the highest literary purposes. T-ong flights are almost never attempted, the epic being a jjroduct altogether alien to llie Chinese mind; but as tests of skill under great technical <litH- culties the eight-line poem and the still harder four-line eingram or 'stoi)-sliort' have remained favorite fomis. Professor (Jiles describes the invariable arrangement of the two conventional tones in the Latter stanza as follows: Sharp Hliarp flat flat sharp Flat fiat. Bhnrp sh«r[i fiat Flat fiat flat sharp sharp .Sharp sharp sharp flat fiat "The efTeet produced by these tones." he says, "is very marked and pleasing to the ear, and often makes up for the faultiness of the rhymes, which are simply the rhymes of the odes as heard 2,500 years ago, many of them of course being no longer rhymes at all. Thus there is a.s much artificiality about a stanza of Chinese verse as